The way it works is simple: You punch your driving destination in
to Luxe. It estimates when you're going to arrive. Then, a Luxe
employee greets you. The Luxe employee takes your car and finds
somewhere to park it.

In San Francisco, where Manjoo lives, parking is a giant pain.
Luxe only charges $5 per hour, or $15 per day. The daily rate is
half the price it normally costs to park in the city all day. The
hourly rate isn't too bad if you value your time properly.

Still! This seems like a silly, frivolous app.

Manjoo and I
do a weekly podcast, and we talked about the app. He
thoroughly defended it. He says it's not frivolous, and that it
is in fact one of the great, hidden benefits of living in San
Francisco.

Here's what he said about living in San Francisco. He's being
slightly jokey, but only slightly:

"San Francisco is this amazing place where there are many, many
kinds of services that are enabled by smartphones and they just
do stuff for you like this. But it's not like they're 1%-er apps,
they're cheaper than previous models, and they're cheaper in some
way because they are being funded by VCs. We in San Francisco get
to — first of all, we have to pay higher real estate prices, but
the benefit is that we get all these services at cut rate. So you
get all these services that aren't making a profit, you're not
paying for them to make a profit, VCs are funding them. But, on
the other hand you have to pay real estate prices."

He also said, that there are going to be competitors to this, so
they are going to collectively lower the price of parking in San
Francisco, which solves a huge dilemma in San Francisco. Lots of
people drive to work in the city, and they used to have to pay
$30 a day, so Luxe has cut the price of parking in half.

This is a small hidden benefit to living in San Francisco. It's
super duper expensive to live there, but new mobile services are
cutting down slightly on other costs, and making life
better.